John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO RUSSIA INSIDER
Ukrainians should be very careful about any training from
American police.
American police forces have a well-earned reputation for
violence and abuse.
They kill a large number of innocent Americans every year -
estimated at 1,000 to 1,500 - far more than any terrorist dreams of. The
statistics are not kept, almost certainly to suppress the shameful reality.
Few if any of them ever are dismissed or charged which means
implicitly that American authorities accept the behavior.
But as few abroad, happily watching re-runs of American television
situation comedies, will know America is a very brutal society in which to
live.
Murder and violent crime rates are high. Police are often
brutal. Prisons are extremely brutal. America maintains the world’s largest
population of its own citizens behind bars. Some of its “super-max” prisons are
an affront to human rights and decency. It embraces the death penalty too.
American police are militarized in their equipment,
training, and attitudes, and the trend in militarization has only increased
greatly in recent years. With all the meaningless colonial wars America has
been fighting, there is a huge pool every year of ex-servicemen of course, all trained
to kill, who need to be absorbed back into the civilian population, and police
work is one of the typical destinations for them.
On top of those horrors, in recent years many American
police forces have undergone training from Israeli forces, and surely there is
no nation on earth whose record of killing and brutality on a per capita basis
exceeds that of Israel.
It is a rather bleak picture in total, and I think any society
which uses training or ideas from American police is desperate or lacks basic understanding.
